Separating View from Data, Plugins, Modularity

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

These are very diffuse questions. You can find your answer to “how modular” by perusing our Customization > Plugin directory and see what people have done with it. Then check out these beginner’s guides:

Developing Discourse Plugins - Part 1 - Create a basic plugin

Building a plugin in Discourse can be really simple, once you learn a couple of quirks. The goal of this post is to create a skeleton plugin and introduce you to the basics. Your development environment Make sure you have a development environment of Discourse running on your computer. I recommend you use the appropriate setup guide and come back when you’re done. plugin.rb Use GitHub - discourse/discourse-plugin-skeleton: Template for Discourse plugins · GitHub to create a complete di…

Learn how to start building stuff for Discourse if you're newbie (like myself)

There are a few ‘how to start’ guides for working with Discourse already and a wealth of useful info on meta, but I thought it might help to give an insight to the mental processes of starting from little, if any, prior coding experience to building substantial Discourse plugins. Discourse is written by experienced developers and has a large codebase. This can feel intimidating. This intimidation factor can be a significant barrier for novice developers. This is a kind of ‘psychological primer’…